Unless you're fluent in the Tamasheq language favoured by North Africa's nomadic tribes, you won't understand exactly what Nigerien artist Mdou Moctar (birth name Mahamadou Souleymane) is singing about on his new album Funeral For Justice.
It won't take you long to get the gist, though.
Against screeching guitars and a booming rhythm section, Moctar unleashes a heartened cry in his native language.
Dear African leaders, hear my burning question
Why does your ear only heed France and America?
They misled you into giving up your lands
They delightfully watch you in your fraternal feud
They possess the power to help out, but chose not to
Mdou Moctar is one of the leading lights in the tishoumaren genre, known better in the west as 'desert blues', along with his Saharan peers like Tinariwen, Songhoy Blues, and Bombino.
The genre's dexterous guitar lines and repetitious rhythms lock in to create a sound that's both psychedelic and hypnotic. Its lyrics are frequently political, often referencing the seemingly endless conflict that bruises the lives of the Tuareg people of northern and west Africa.
For Moctar, a man heralded as one of the world's great modern rock guitarists by fans like Jack White and Metallica's Kirk Hammett, it's time people heard more than his scintillating fretwork. And he wants the world to know that there is deep suffering everywhere.
"This album is direct," he says. "We just tell the world what we feel is going on around the world, not just from my hometown."
It's all there in the album's title, Funeral For Justice. Years on the road as a touring musician has given Mdou Moctar greater insight into what he considers a humanitarian emergency.
"I feel like justice doesn't exist anymore," he says. "The strong are all the time trying to hurt the weak. When you are weak, you are nothing, you have no support. I don't think that is justice.
"Look at the genocide in Palestine. Look at what has happened in Ukraine. Look at what has happened in Sudan, in Libya, Somalia, different places around the world. No one's saying nothing.
"If, tomorrow, one kid was hurt in the United States, or in Europe or Asia, you will see that on the internet, the papers, the BBC, all those are gonna talk about that.
"But look at how many kids die every day. How many ladies die every day for no reason, and they are innocent. No one can say nothing. I feel like that is injustice. That is not fair. It's because justice doesn't exist.
"That means this is the funeral for justice. I feel like the leaders just manipulate the world."
Moctar is in New York City, riding high after two lauded performances at California's Coachella music festival.
Life on the road is the norm for him and his band these days, so he really relished some recent time in West Africa before his new album's release, and the chance to help those living there.
"It's lovely," he says of getting home after spending so much time on the road. "I want to share not just music with the people. When I [was] home [last], I was in the bush a lot to see how the people feel.
"I build the wealth for them. I do the donation. It was very fun. I loved what I did."
While he pledges support for people of all nationalities, his lived experience means that the struggles of the West African people dominate much of his music.
On the song 'Imouhar', one of the album's most enthralling moments, Moctar laments the ongoing diminishment of the Tamasheq dialect spoken among his friends and family.
Imouhagh this shames us, we must confess
Waking up one day our kids can't speak Tamasheq
The loss of Tamasheq, his people's spoken language, and Tifinagh, its written form, is of concern to Moctar and his peers.
"It's very important for us, because we don't want our language gonna go away," he explains.
"The Tifinagh is what we write, it's what our community write. But when colonisation was in Africa, they break all those stuff.
"They first send the people to school and they read the French language. The French language is the official language in our countries. The younger generation, they didn't know how to write Tifinagh and we are very scared that our language Tamasheq is gonna go away.
"We try to tell them they have to be very careful. They have to take this language serious and talk in that language."
These heavy themes are backed by music that hits just as hard. Funeral For Justice is deliberately an album that's hard to ignore. Its squalling guitars and unrelenting rhythms come through the speakers at full pelt.
"Of course it's our decision, because [on] this album the message is in your face," Moctar says. "The music is supposed to be like very serious and very aggressive as well, because we send this message: it's an emergency."
There is good reason Moctar has been nicknamed the 'Hendrix of the Sahara', his playing is not just technically brilliant, but imbued with an irreplicable rawness that comes from passion as much as it does practice.
The guitar is an extension of Mdou Moctar at this point, and a vital tool in communicating his messages with audiences who speak any language.
"When I cry, my guitar helps me to cry. When I'm smiling, my guitar helps me to smile. When I feel hurt, my guitar will feel hurt.
"It's what I have to use to tell the world my feeling. For me it's a good way to send the messages around the world."
One of those messages is about the money spent on developing weapons when so much of the world lives in hunger.
"Building the houses for the poor [and] making life simple for them around all the world, I think that is better than creating the gun machine or giving super strong training to the soldier just to make them super criminal," he says.
"When they kill, they kill the poor people. They build a really expensive machine gun to kill someone who didn't have even food, didn't have no work, didn't have nothing.
"You spend like billions of dollars just to kill those people. That doesn't make no sense for me. I think the world is going crazy and that is not justice."
The album ends on 'Modern Slaves', its demurest moment in a musical sense, but a song packed with heartbreakingly stark truths about the injustice faced by the world's poorest nations.
Oh world, why be so selective about human beings?
My people are crying while you laugh
Oh world, why be so selective about countries?
Yours are well built while ours are being destroyed
"For me, we're still slaves," Moctar considers.
"We are not free to build our own money. If you have [our] money in France, you can do nothing with that money. But if you have Euro in our country, you're going to do whatever you need to do with that. That means we are not free.
"If we have gold or uranium or whatever resource we have in our country, France is gonna decide for us who has to buy it and then she's the one who's going to decide the price. It's not fair. It's not freedom. We are modern slaves."
Funeral For Justice is out now.
https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMiWmh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvbmV3cy8yMDI0LTA1LTIzL21kb3UtbW9jdGFyLWludGVydmlldy1mdW5lcmFsLWZvci1qdXN0aWNlLzEwMzg3NjA0ONIBKGh0dHBzOi8vYW1wLmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvYXJ0aWNsZS8xMDM4NzYwNDg?oc=5
2024-05-23 00:09:57Z
CBMiWmh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvbmV3cy8yMDI0LTA1LTIzL21kb3UtbW9jdGFyLWludGVydmlldy1mdW5lcmFsLWZvci1qdXN0aWNlLzEwMzg3NjA0ONIBKGh0dHBzOi8vYW1wLmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvYXJ0aWNsZS8xMDM4NzYwNDg
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar